Black Holes in the Visual Arts
27/11/26–11/04/27

Cosmic black holes are a paradoxical motif. They are invisible bodies from which even light cannot escape, meaning they should be impossible to depict – and yet, artists attempt to do so using a wide range of methods and techniques, from scientific and popular science illustrations to paintings, sculptures, photograms and installations. The exhibition looks at the colourful history of black holes in Czech visual culture from the mid-20th century to the present day.

Non-rotating black holes were first discovered by the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild in 1915, when he formulated his solution to Einstein’s field equations. Still, the scientific community did not begin to truly take an interest in these collapsed stars until half a century later, a development significantly influenced by the term “black hole,” which was popularized by the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler in the late 1960s. The term quickly found its way to Czechoslovakia, where at the time the field of astrophysics was somewhere between West and East. Czech publications made mixed use of Anglo-Saxon and Soviet terminology, and illustrations from American magazines appeared next to images from Moscow. In Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, the term “black hole” existed alongside other labels such as “collapsar”, “frozen star” and “gravitational grave”. The term “black hole” ultimately prevailed in part because of its psychological significance – it quickly became a metaphor for decline and depression.

Although black holes themselves are, by definition, impossible to see, many highly visual processes take place in their vicinity that can be attractive for artists. One of the most striking such phenomena is the accretion disk whose rotation heats gas and dust to millions of degrees Kelvin; another is the enormous jets of particles resulting from the black hole’s magnetic field. But artists can also depict “invisible” phenomena such as the curvature of space-time. It should nevertheless be stressed that artists’ interest in black holes tends to be highly subjective. Whether they are expressing sombre emotions or reflecting on the interconnectedness of the universe, they tend to work with this motif as a more general symbol and are not concerned with scientific approximation. As the art historian Timothy James Clark presciently observed, such literalness would only work against them: “Art usually dines very poorly on the leavings of science.”

The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.